How to Do Something Beautiful With Your Life

Lifting Up and Falling Down

I listened to New Order’s Music Complete obsessively this weekend. It’s a painfully beautiful album.

It got me thinking about beauty. Here’s what I thought.

Make Something Beautiful

I think that, as Camus said, the great obligation we have in this life is to love. But how are we to do it? My simple answer (for now) is: make something beautiful.

It doesn’t matter what it is. A book, a business, a family, an idea. That’s immaterial, because beauty is too. What does matter is that we are consumed by the act, and so transformed by the path.

Beauty Expresses Suffering

Of course, I don’t mean superficial beauty. Nobody in New Order’s a Kardashian. Thank God. That’s why, let’s face it, a century from now, nobody’s going to remember the Kardashians, and my great grandkids will probably rediscover Music Complete.

All of which tells us something true about beauty, which is that beauty is truth. Not abstract, scientific truth. But human truth, fragile and delicate and improbable. The truest of human truths is suffering.

Beauty begins with witnessing suffering. Not stopping it. Even just your own. Why is that? You can’t really make anyone stop suffering. The most that any of us can do is to witness the great human truth of suffering.

And then express it. Each in our ways. We share the songs, the stories, the myths, the journey. Of what our suffering has meant to us.

When you think about anything really beautiful to you, it is an intimate expression of your suffering. The one you thought was unique, special, alone yours. Now you realize: you’re not alone. You never were. That intimacy is like a great embrace holding your naked heart up. And saying: “I have suffered too, just as you do”.

We Need to be Seen Most When We Fall Hardest

In this way, beauty redeems suffering. It imbues heartbreak with purpose, grief with meaning, agony with grace. Now you don’t suffer emptily, meaninglessly, pointlessly. There is a reason, and that reason is lifting others up. Not necessarily “preventing their mistakes”. Just so that your song is there after they make them.

There’s a simpler word for that, isn’t there? Love.

Each and every one of us in this little life will fall. We fall apart, fall to pieces, fall down, stumble. Our glass hearts will shatter and the north wind will roar through, extinguishing the light in us.

What do we do then? Then we are naked, shivering, alone in the cold.

That is when we need to be seen, isn’t it? When we are at our most naked, hopeless, silent, afraid? People may see when we are strong. But it is when we are broken that we cry out just for someone, anyone, to witness, to recognise, to see us.

Otherwise, what has all the suffering been worth? What’s the point of a shattered heart if no one is there to see the light it reveals, to recognise it, to hold it up?

When you create something really beautiful, you are seeing people this way. Your song is there when their hearts break. When they are naked. When they need to be seen the most. The suffering in the song sees the light in the broken heart. And holds it up to the endless sky.

That’s a kind of imperfect love. It isn’t the love of the mother for the child. But we can’t love everyone that way. Maybe it’s enough to witness, to express, to give this gift to one another. Why?

Your Suffering + My Suffering = Zero

One of my coaching clients recently said to me: “I can’t tell the people I love about my pain. Why would I want to burden them?”

Maybe by now you see the answer.

The mind doesn’t understand the logic of the heart. The mind thinks. It adds and subtracts. When there are two like things, it adds. Therefore, it concludes: “my suffering plus your suffering equals more suffering”.

But exactly the opposite is true. My suffering is the only thing in the world that can take yours away. Put it in perspective, gently unsharpen it, imbue it with meaning, awaken its purpose.

Your suffering and my suffering are clouds in the same perfect sky. When you see mine, you are teaching me: behind all clouds is the endless horizon of possibility. Suffering is just the journey of the cloud falling into the ocean, to rise back into the limitless sky. That is love, profound and pure.

When I use poetic language like that, maybe you think it’s beautiful. Why? Because I am seeing through your mind, and it’s false logic. Into the truth of us. I am seeing your suffering. Now there is beauty.

So go out there in this big world and do something impossibly, heartstoppingly beautiful. Look at the world’s broken hearts. See the light burning inside. Start with yours. Express all that. In a book, idea, startup, song. Be the hand that holds the light up.

Give the world the gift of seeing it fall. When I see you fall, that is the instant I love.

Umair

Philadelphia

September 2016